Yeah, yeah, yeah. You think I’m gonna trot out the same stale jokes we’ve all heard before about how wonderful it is to stay inside with all these lights and endless streams of running water. Well, get ready because I am. I am going to tell you all of these jokes and more.

Listen. I like being outdoors. I like it a lot. There are trees outdoors, and I’ll have you know I’m fond of trees. I have a special place in my heart for trees. Sometimes I leave the house specifically to commune with them. There are also mountains and rocks and plants outdoors, and I like those too. And I’m not a frilly, fussy, or nervous person, so on some level camping just fits me. 

So whenever anybody brings up camping, I am always all over it. Camping never ceases to sound like an extraordinary idea. Yet it’s an extraordinary idea much the in same way that jamming pizza in your drunken piehole at 2:30 a.m. always sounds like a dazzling plan. It’s only when you’re in that hazy mid-chew reverie, a trail of cheese tracking down your chin, that a tiny flame of thought sputters to life in your brain. You start putting two and two together. Nearly-forgotten memories of the last time you did this come surging into your consciousness until you have to put your half-gnawed piece of crust down and go, oh, shit. This isn’t going to end well, is it? And it never does, my friend.

It never does.

I’m not trying to insinuate that my camping experience ended in tears, or missing limbs, or even jail time. It was just that I was in the semi-wilderness for approximately 42 hours and it was utterly exhausting. You know why? Because everything takes five times longer than it normally would while you’re camping. The simple act of brushing your teeth now involves trekking across your campsite, unzipping your tent, digging around in a bag, trekking back across the campsite to find some water, going BACK to the tent when you realize you forgot the toothpaste, getting utterly distracted by chasing a large insect off of your sleeping bag, and so on. By the time you actually finish brushing your teeth, an hour or more has disappeared. Poof! Never to return. Heaven help you if you dare to take on the staggering task of washing your face; you may as well write off half of the day.

None of this is necessarily a bad thing, really. Since my everyday modern life consists of sprinting from one task to another in the spirit of productivity, there’s something to be said for a weekend in which washing your face is the crowning achievement. Still. It was surprising. Something I’d forgotten about since the last time I went camping.

Other facts I’d forgotten about camping since the last time I went camping:

It’s dirty outside. Really dirty. Think of the dirtiest, sweatiest, most filth-encrusted you’ve ever been. Now multiply that by 800. That, my friend, is cleaner than you will be when you’re camping. 

The silence is deafening. In the light of day, the peace and quiet is charming. Invigorating, even. But in the dark of night, you just lie there with your eyes wide open, waiting to hear the footsteps of the serial killer approaching. 

Animals are dicks. The foxes that barked and scuffled outside our tent all night? ASSHOLES. And the birds when the sun came up? Seriously, sunlight is like ultraviolet cocaine for birds. I HEARD YOU, MOTHERFUCKERS. Guess I’m up now!

Things in nature want to kill you. Arguably, things in the city want to kill you as well, but at least there I have more than a flap of canvas between me and them.

Toilets are the best invention ever. Best ever. I’m like the Jimmy Stewart of camping¹; I saw a glimpse of what life was like without toilets and I promise to never ever take them for granted again. I will never again wish I was dead dream of a dishwasher as long as I can have my family and friends back my toilet back oh god oh please oh god. 

Mountains are okay.

You know what else is okay? Hiking on a beautiful summer day with friends. Are you throwing up now? I bet you’re hurling under your desk from all this sheer optimism. Sorry, it won’t happen again.

You know what’s not okay? Poison oak. This area is absolutely riddled with the stuff, but it’s never affected me. UNTIL NOW. I shouldn’t complain because it affected the beau a lot more than me.² And here I’d smugly thought I was impervious to the stuff.

Lesson learned.

What have you learned from camping?

¹ Except with fewer high-waisted pants.

² Now I get to head to Michigan on Friday with what looks like giant red pimples all over my legs. Don’t worry friends, I’m not contagious! I just look like I am.³

³ The Ohio meetup is on and I’m excited!

***

Like almost everything else in my life, it started with a Craigslist ad.

Room for rent in a two-bedroom apartment downtown. $500 per month.

$500? In downtown Santa Barbara? Seemed too good to be true. I’d been trawling the listings for weeks, months, and the usual going rate to rent a room was $700-$900 per month. Which I couldn’t afford. But $500? I could manage to wring $500 out of my meager pay as a marketing coordinator.

Coordinating marketing, man. It’s serious business. You gotta say, this marketing goes there! And that marketing goes here! Kind of like Tetris. Except usually with Tetris you’re not on the phone with a print vendor begging for a faster turnaround. And also you spend a lot of time surreptitiously G-chatting with your friend who is equally miserable in her job. So maybe it’s not remotely like Tetris at all.

Where were we going with this, now?

RIGHT. ROOMMATE.

I didn’t have high hopes when I sent the email inquiring about the room. I figured it had already been snatched up, or maybe it was all a joke from the start. Haha 500 $ a month?? u must b STOOPID! !!! hehe

Because someone that cruel would have to spell like a middle school dropout, amirite?

The Craigslist poster wrote me back inside an hour. The room was still available, he said, and I could come by to check it out that night if I wanted.

The building was 1970s brown. The bathroom had coral tile. The tiny window in my potential bedroom overlooked a concrete wall. The poster — I’ll call him Kurt — sat on a threadbare couch wearing a ripped Nirvana t-shirt and rigorously avoided eye contact with me. I was 25 and he was 26. Via faltering small talk we discovered that we’d both taken German and done track and field in school. I asked why he’d listed the room so cheaply, and he shrugged. Even he didn’t seem to know.

I figured I could settle for a strange roommate if it meant discounted rent in a prime location. “Well,” I told him as I stood to leave, “I’m still interested, so just let me know.”

“I already checked you out, and you passed. The room is yours. You can move in any time,” Kurt replied.

Oh… kay?

***

One month later, I moved in. Unwittingly, I’d chosen to move in on the day of the Solstice festival in my town, which is when the yuppies take off their shirts and pretend to be hippies for a day. The closest street parking was three blocks away, which made carrying boxes somewhat, uh, challenging. I’d also brought a box of cleaning supplies, because there was no way I was moving into that place without scrubbing every common surface first.

I standing in the tub carrying out a furious attack on some scummy shower tile when the front door banged open. Kurt had arrived with two friends wearing shit-eating grins. They had been to the parade, and next they were going up to the Sostice celebration in the park. I should come, they told me. I politely begged off but Kurt grabbed my arm and pulled me into the kitchen, where they commenced gathering provisions for their jaunt to the park. First they all took a shot of Christian Brothers brandy, and then Kurt began to pour Tanqueray gin into a ratty Nalgene water bottle.

“Oh shit,” one of his friends said, digging in the freezer. “We’re outta ice.”

Kurt paused, wobbling slightly, to take stock of the situation, then reached into the back and pulled out a plastic bag of frozen brussels sprouts. He ripped the bag open and dumped the contents into the gin-filled Nalgene, stray sprouts rolling every which way across the counter.

He screwed the cap on and they left.

Two hours later, Kurt wandered back in with one friend, the other having seemingly been lost en route. He put on a VHS tape of G.I. Joe: The Movie as his friend passed out on the couch. Kurt nodded off in a recliner, head slowly dropping to his chest, fingers gradually relaxing on his Coors Lite until the can slipped from his grasp and emptied all over his leg and into the seat cushion.

The dude didn’t even wake up.

***

Kurt was a heavy drinker, which didn’t initially seem out of place because many of my post-college-age friends were heavy drinkers at the time. Over the following weeks, though, he regaled me with endless stories about “that one time.” There was that one time he was so drunk that he thought the cops were looking for him and hid for hours under a parked vehicle on the street. There was that one time he was so drunk at his work’s holiday party that he told his boss to fuck off. There was that one time he managed to pass through a DUI checkpoint while intoxicated out of his mind.

He was a person of curious extremes. During the weekdays he played a sober Jekyll to his drunken Hyde, huddled at home eating a can of soup in front of the television. He adored his mother as much as he hated his father. He was equally as likely to be found watching a UFC fight as he was his DVD set of Sex and the City.

I never quite knew what he did at his job. The best I could figure was that it involved some kind of programming. Then again, he was incredibly suspicious and rarely told the whole story about anything. He’d dealt drugs in high school, he told me, and then he invested in a lot of stocks. He’d used a chunk of that money to buy a white Mercedes.

He insinuated that he knew a couple of important “sources” that had helped him get his police record erased. He also insinuated he’d used those sources to run a background check on me before we’d met, which was a bit … unsettling, to say the least.

The other things I learned after moving in were just as amusing as they were tragic:

• Kurt had grown pot in the closet of my room before I moved in.
• He’d also peed on the carpet in my room while drunk.
• As you’ve likely gathered, he was obsessed — OBSESSED — with Kurt Cobain, and with Nirvana. He had a guitar that Cobain had supposedly played, and a shirt he’d supposedly worn. He swore up and down that if he played Nirvana while driving drunk, nothing bad would happen.
• He hated — HATED — the beau. He once told me about a girl in our apartment complex who’d asked him who that “short and fat” guy was after seeing Beau in the courtyard with me. I strongly suspected that he invented this conversation just so he’d have an excuse to diss my boyfriend.¹
• He had this habit of leaving the apartment door open so that he and his friends could hurl their cans and bottles outside as soon as the contents were consumed. Which inevitably led to me stomping downstairs and picking everything up in an self-righteous rage.
• He couldn’t be bothered to open anything else in the apartment, though. Mold had grown around all the windows before I moved in because he left them closed, with the blinds drawn tight over them, every single day.
• He never cleaned up after himself, which didn’t help my battle against the roaches in the kitchen.
• He was, however, obsessed with soaps. One day he went to Bath & Body Works and came back with no less than six different scents of the same hand gel. He lined them all up on the counter by color, and there they remained. Annoyed at the lack of counter space, I’d sometimes throw them under the sink, but the next time I went back in the bathroom, there they were again, proudly on display.

As if all this wasn’t enough, the worst came the night I got home from the bar to find the living room trashed; my couch turned over. I was a little drunk, quite honestly, and a lot angry, so I wrote a note about respecting my stuff, taped it to the upended couch, and went to bed. An hour and a half later I was startled awake by the sound of my door busting open and the sight of a silhouette in my doorway.

Mr. Hyde had found my note and had come to confront me.

“Fffffffffuck you,” he said. “Fffffuck. You.”

He had a habit of drawing out consonants when he’d been drinking.

“Get out of my room,” I croaked warily.

He staggered towards me. He was grinning, he was laughing, but he was still cursing. I was so confused and upset that I began crying. He sat down on the edge of the bed and put his hand on my stomach. I lost my shit. “GET OUT!” I yelled. “Go away! Get out! Leave me alone!”

After he left, I sobbed myself to sleep.

That was pretty much the beginning of the end.

I didn’t have enough money to just move out, so I made myself as scarce as possible. I filled the hours of the day with work and classes, and slept over at the beau’s house when I could. The nights I was home I came to dread hearing the front door open, and came to dread leaving my room to cook food or use the bathroom.

Months of living like this took its toll, though, and by the following spring I was at a breaking point. I was venting to my friend at work about how tense it was at my place when she took me by the shoulders. “We have got to get you out of there,” she said.

So she did. One Saturday she and five of my other friends descended on the apartment. I was relieved to find Kurt gone; that meant we could pack in peace. We boxed as much stuff as we could and hauled it to a storage unit. The plan was that I’d couch-surf until the beau’s roommate moved out, and then I’d move in with him.

Afterwards, sweaty and tired, we went out for celebratory Mexican food and margaritas. I felt lighter than I had in a long, long time. So of course I came back the following Monday to get the rest of my stuff only to find Kurt had changed the locks.

I eventually got my things, but not before paying him more money first.

I think of Kurt every time I see a white Mercedes, which is not an uncommon occurrence in this town. I consider this as all kind of funny now, in a wincing kind of way. At the very least I got decent stories to share at parties out of the experience.

LESSON LEARNED: Not every deal on Craigslist is a good one, y’all.

Okay, your turn. Who was your worst roommate?

¹ Come on, you’ve seen pictures of him. He may be the same height as me, but he is not “fat.”

“What defines a relationship is the work that’s involved to maintain it, and it’s constantly changing. Sometimes I’m deeply in love with David and head-over-heels, and sometimes I question whether it’s going to work out and is meant to be. It’s like a business relationship, as well as a personal one; we have a business together and that’s maintaining our love for one another.”

Uh, FUCK YEAH. Fuck storybook romance and resentful ball-and-chain, relationships are a BUSINESS.

***

Last Tuesday night we roused ourselves off of our butts after 8 p.m. and walked to a bar to see the Montreal-based band Handsome Furs play. I knew little about them outside of the fact that they consist solely of the vocalist/guitarist from Wolf Parade and his wife. I’d spent the majority of 2006 listening to Apologies to the Queen Mary on repeat, so I figured that was impetus enough to go check out the gig.

It was a small space and a short set, but the pair put forth a good effort. By the second song the tall man in the leather jacket standing in front of me had gone from tapping his toe to shaking his whole leg. In terms of middle-aged-white-man-dressed-in-lawyer-casual, this was the equivalent of straight-up poppin’ and lockin’ to the beat.

I enjoyed their songs, but I think I mostly enjoyed watching their dynamic. I’d never seen music performed by married people, so I hadn’t known what to expect. Subtle nagging? Glares of contempt? Jaws set in resignation? Falling asleep on the stage early in separate beds because their lives were over?

Nope. Instead we saw two people who were watching each other joyfully, playing off of each others’ energy, and exchanging grins and in-jokes.

Sure, maybe it helped that they were both absolutely high as kites.

But I remained heartened by seeing a couple that just seemed to like each other. So much is said about the importance of love in marriage and not enough about the importance of like. The aim of which, of course, is not to like each other 100% of the time. Most of the time is an admirable enough accomplishment.

Most of the time is a good deal in the hard business world of relationships.

How does one celebrate a wedding anniversary? What is one supposed to do? This was our first, you see, so there’s bound to be some confusion. Some hesitation. Some Googling of what’s considered appropriate behavior and norms. Some painting of faces and dashing around the house shrieking like loons.

Although in retrospect I’m not sure that last part actually had anything to do with planning our anniversary celebration per se.

In the United States the traditional gift for the first year of marriage is paper. I got really excited when I found that out, because we have all stacks of all kinds of printer paper buried in a cabinet somewhere. I figured I could hand the beau a sheaf of the nice resume paper — you know, to keep it classy — and call it a day. But it turns out the internet has other ideas. The internet thought that the paper should have something on it. The internet thought I should write him a love letter, or buy him some concert tickets, a book, or a puzzle. I thought that sounded hard. Especially because we were getting to the point where I’d have to choose rush shipping in order to have the gift arrive in time for our anniversary. Yes, even for the love letter option. Do you really think that I’d be able to come up with something as serious as a love letter on my own?

In the end, it was Living Social that saved my ass. Two days before our anniversary, Living Social offered an online deal for a tequila and chocolate tasting at a local restaurant. Somehow sausage was included as an add-on to-go option; separate from the tasting. I bought that too, because, well, WHY NOT. And once the purchase was completed I fired up Illustrator, made a hasty vector drawing, and printed it out.

On resume paper, natch.

It looked like this:

The beau’s present to me? Paper flowers, made from old maps and music sheets. Much prettier than my cell phone camera would have you believe:

*****

But I’m getting ahead of myself, now.

Truthfully, we cheated a bit with the whole anniversary thing. We talked about it in advance: what did we want to do? Did we want to exchange any gifts, and if so, what was the dollar limit? All of which means that we are totally flunking Movie Romance 101, I know. If we truly wanted to cherish and nurture our love, we would have independently gone about springing the most complicated and grandiose surprises on one another, and by movie law they would have required candlelit dinners on private balconies overlooking the city, rose petals strewn hither and yon, the presentation of jewelry boxes, and oral sex.

What we decided on, instead, was to just have a weekend of fun. We would hang out and spend time with each other. We would go out to eat and we would go out to drink. We made reservations at a local sustainable restaurant we’d been dying to try, and we made plans to go wine-tasting on Saturday and Sunday.

We would exchange small “paper” gifts, sure, but the real anniversary gift to ourselves was to live, very briefly, like we were on vacation. It was perfect. It was us. And it was gonna be awesome.

*****

The universe has a way, of course, of taking you down a peg or three when you least expect it. The first hit came on Saturday morning, when I woke up much earlier than should be legal to go to a massage appointment. When we went to switch cars, the beau’s engine wouldn’t turn over. His starter had died. Well, what can you do? We put his car in neutral and backed it out, had a brief moment of excitement when it got going a little too fast and ended up in a very large and very deep pothole, strained to push it out of the pothole, then finally got it parked in place. At least I still had a car that ran, right? And it looked like I’d be doing all the driving until we could manage to get his car fixed.

Just a few short hours later, I went to wash our lunch dishes and found the kitchen sink wouldn’t drain. We don’t have a garbage disposal, so at first I thought the pop-up basket strainers had gotten stuck down. Nope. Even when I lifted the strainers out of the drains, the water level didn’t budge. What? We’re always careful not to let any food escape down the drains. In fact, we’re so careful with the kitchen pipes that — unlike other, more notorious sections of plumbing in the house — we’ve not once had a problem with them. Until now, it would seem.

Great timing, eh?

Just like the car issue, we decided to leave the plumbing issue behind for the moment. Well, what can you do? It was getting late and we had strict plans to go have us some fun.

*****

And have fun we did. We drove down to the sleepy, semi-rural town of Ojai and had a wine tasting, took a stroll, visited a pub, and nibbled on some cheese and salami in a park. It was warm and bright, and the golden sunlight through the oak trees felt like summer. I took off my sweater and stood on the sidewalk in my army green tank dress and flip-flops. My stupid sunglasses kept sliding down my nose and my hair was a mess from rolling the windows down in the car, but I didn’t care. I leaned into the beau, then punched him lightly in the arm.

It was truly a beautiful afternoon.

Saturday night, we had dinner reservations at Julienne. We utterly spoiled ourselves at this restaurant. We ended up getting five-course tastings with wine pairings, and our ridiculously delicious meal unfolded languorously over 2.5 hours. We rolled ourselves home in a blissful haze that immediately dissipated when we opened the front door and got smacked in the face by the stench of dirty water standing in the kitchen sink.

OH, RIGHT. THAT.

We tried plunging it, and we tried snaking it. We even, God help us, tried Drano. Nothing worked.

It was a bummer of a way to end the day, but well, what can you do, indeed.

*****

The next morning — the morning of our anniversary — we got up early, again, and tackled the stupid kitchen sink. The beau dismantled the pipes and proceeded to snake each one. He put them back together and the sink still wouldn’t drain, so he tried and tried again. The real low point came when the cranked snake accidentally spun out of control, spattering fetid black gunk all over the inside of the cabinet, the beau’s face, and his clothes.

My god, did it stink.

It took three hours to clear the plumbing and clean everything up, but we did it. We got a late start to our day, but we did it. We hadn’t been able to crack open the special bottle of champagne my parents had gotten us for our first anniversary like we wanted, and we hadn’t been able to hang out and relax with each other like we wanted, but the damn sink was fixed.

Things were looking up.

Things were going quite wonderfully, actually, as we drove over the mountains and into the hot Santa Ynez valley. Once again we had the windows all the way down to try to compensate for my broken air conditioning, but the beating sun made us sweat through our clothes anyway. The wind screamed through the car, whipping our hair around as we shouted along to music and to each other. We roamed the back roads until we chose a winery at random and happily, luckily, found ourselves sitting on a long shaded porch, watching deer eating leaves off the grape vines stretching out in rows below us. We were back in the universe’s favor once again.

Until very suddenly, we were not.

We started talking about what to have for dinner, and somehow, this turned into a fight. It sounds ludicrous, right? How can two people who love each other possibly fight over what to eat on their one-year wedding anniversary? I’m not sure, but we managed to figure it out. We were that couple in the corner, keeping our voices to a whisper, but whose tension and stiff body language was attracting the stares of all the other winery-goers. And then, even more preposterously, I was that person who started crying, and then I was that person who suddenly got a wad of tissues stuffed into her hand from the winery hostess, because even though I was trying to keep my crying a secret, apparently I’m not very good at keeping secrets.

And then? I don’t know. I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but everything completely and utterly fell apart. After a weekend of relatively minor frustrations and setbacks, we somehow weren’t able to overcome a simple disagreement about what to eat for dinner. I was so mortified about having cried in public that I couldn’t stop crying. I cried while driving; I cried while we tried to walk around the tiny town of Los Olivos and talk about things. And then we couldn’t seem to figure out how to talk about the fact that we couldn’t talk about things, so I cried about that.

I eventually stopped crying, and we were eventually able to sort ourselves out, but our moods didn’t improve. The sun had already set when we got back home, defeated. Our anniversary was practically over, and we had to get ready for the upcoming work week. And that’s really what killed me. I was so angry, and so incredibly disappointed, that a special day was ruined by stupid, useless shit. Without even meaning to, I’d inadvertently pinned hopes on this day. Nothing elaborate or particularly meaningful, mind you, but still. I’d envisioned us relaxing on the sun in a blanket, sipping our anniversary champagne and enjoying each other. You only get one first wedding anniversary, after all, and we’d clearly managed to ruin ours. What did all this bad juju mean for the future of our marriage?

And to top it off, we hadn’t even had sex, and what kind of couple doesn’t HAVE SEX on their FIRST WEDDING ANNIVERSARY!? ¹

A bad couple in a bad marriage, that’s who.

*****

That’s patently untrue. I know this. I know this because marriage isn’t a collection of anniversaries. Marriage is every day. And just like any other day of the year, special days can pleasantly surprise you, or rudely cut you back down to size. This past weekend we were on the receiving end of both extremes, which is much better than a barrage of purely bad stuff. I am so glad we had those few precious hours of fun on Saturday. Even though they didn’t technically happen on the day of our anniversary, they still happened.

Perversely, maybe it’s better that it ended up working out this way. What’s a more fitting tribute to a lifetime of marriage, with all its intrinsic ups and downs, than a weekend of ups and downs? A tableau of our marriage in miniature. Sweet and salty at the same time. Maddening and sublime.

Maybe the lesson here is that I should just grab the good whenever I can get it, and don’t look back.

… Of course, that means I’d have to go and learn a lesson, and what’s the fun in that?

*****

¹ Incidentally, this is why wedding-night and other “special occasion” sex makes me squirm. I have so much accumulated sex guilt that I don’t need the additional pressure of expectations wearing on my psyche. But, you know, THAT’S JUST ME. We are all different and preshus and speshul and I applaud anyone with sex confidence because, damn, it’s hard to come by. ²

² HAW HAW I SAID “COME.”

Not quiet in the sense of turning the volume way down on NOW That’s What I Call Music vol. 3 and halting my boot-stomping, pot-lid-banging parade around the house. No, I mean quiet in the sense of not talking so damn much.

You see, while I tend to be reserved around strangers, around close friends and lovers I tend to behave like a raving lunatic. I crack bad jokes faster than I can come up with them, I voluntarily disclose embarrassing facts about myself, and I generally do everything within my feeble power for a laugh. And with the beau it’s exponentially worse, because I am around him all the time. I mean, even when we’re busy with separate extracurricular activities — which is often — I can bet that at some point during the day I’ll step into the bathroom and find him brushing his teeth. Or I’ll wander into the kitchen and find him rummaging in the pantry. Or maybe he’ll be standing by the dryer, pantsless, waiting for the creases to get tumbled out of his work khakis. Oh, you. There you are. So we meet again.

Me, in 2005. Trying to bowl. Failing, a little bit. Or a lot.

• Threatening him with divorce
• Threatening to punch him in the face
• Chasing him around the house in an attempt to punch and/or tickle him
• Repeatedly asking him irritating questions to which I already know the answers, like “So, what’s your name?” and “How does it feel to be a Beau Lastname?”¹
• Pretending I don’t know him and ordering him out of my house
• Accusing him of contracting a venereal disease
• Replacing the lyrics to popular songs with his name and singing it over and over
• Performing complicated interpretive dances set to aforementioned songs

Mom: “So I had a coupon for Kohl’s and I used it to buy towels that were already on sale. I’m going to put them in the powder room. I ended up getting them almost half off, and they are very cute.” Me: “Nice!” Mom: “I’m thinking about moving the old powder room towels to the basement bathroom, because you know your Dad only uses that one. Of course, I am going to need new towels for the upstairs bathroom, but I’m also thinking of replacing the curtains in there.” Me [eyes going unfocused]: “Mmm-hmm.” Mom: “Those curtains are just so old, they were already there when we moved in, and you know I’ve tried to wash them but they’re just at the point where they’re gross. Oh, and I also finally found a mirror to put over that table in the hall, but I’m concerned that the wood color doesn’t really match ….”

Mom: “… The doctor said he had arthritis, and that it probably came from an old dirt bike injury. So your poor dad can’t really use his knee right now. But he’s got another appointment next month, so we’ll see what they say then.” Me: ARTHRITIS INJURY WHUT!!?!?1/12323402p0ypoqjof~!?

Sigh.

Every day is an exercise in futility.

Oh, what? I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you over my raging self-pity. Also, you are likely located hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from me, so you might want to consider speaking up.

What’s got me so glum, chum? I don’t know. That ol’ clock just keeps on beating me down. Father Time: what a dick, right? Talk about the long arm of the patriarchy — they can even screw me over metaphysically.

Every single day I wake up in the morning feeling arguably not unlike P. Diddy, though since I’ve never had the appreciable pleasure of being P. Diddy what exactly that feeling entails remains open to speculation. Regardless, my wee hours never fail to brim over with optimism and wide-eyed opportunity. Hey! I think to myself. I’m gonna get up early! I’m gonna get all my work done by 5:00 p.m.! I’m gonna write a post! No — I’m gonna write three posts! I’m gonna vacuum the entire house! I’m gonna reorganize the entire house! I’m gonna save up money and buy us a new house! Before dinnertime! I’m gonna pay off all my student loans before breakfast! I’m gonna stand in a golden shaft of sunlight smiling so wide that all my teeth show as my skin emits an ethereal bronze glow and the breeze gently ruffles my hair without mussing it up, just like how women look in commercials for feminine hygiene products and those pharmaceutical drugs you should ask your doctor about!

Needless to say, by the time I actually get out of bed all of these good intentions have already begun to deflate. From there, the rest of the day is just one long slow sideways slump into chaos and disappointment.

Very un-Diddy-like, indeed.¹

Lyn, you’re saying. Lyn. What’s going on? What could possibly be causing you all this inner turmoil? Or maybe you aren’t saying that at all. Maybe you’re actually saying WHAT IS UP WITH THIS WHOLE LIBYA THING or PLEASE GOD I NEVER WANT TO SEE A BUD LITE COMMERCIAL AGAIN or THEY SHOULD TOTALLY RELEASE A BIOGRAPHY TITLED CRAY-CRAY IN THE HOO-HA: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KATY PERRY. I don’t actually know what you are saying, because like I said, the distance issue. SPEAK UP.

But back to me, here. The source of all this malaise is my new job. Which, by the way, those of you who are new here (I’m sorry!) or too drunk to remember the times I virtually wrung my hands about New Jobs and the Having of Them should probably know that I have a new job. And for the sake of this post making any sense, here’s a very boring but necessary bit of backstory about how that works:

While I occasionally go into the office, 90% of my time is spent working from home. My bosses assign me to-dos via a software platform that manages the design/meeting notes, login information, timelines, goals, due dates, and other pertinent information for each client all in one place. As I work throughout the day, I use a timer widget on my computer’s dashboard. Each time I start the timer, I select the client, the project, and the individual task. When I switch gears, I stop the timer and restart it with new information. Everything is automatically tracked over time, which makes both billing the client and getting paid really easy.

It’s an incredibly cool, incredibly efficient way to work.

It’s also an incredibly frustrating, hair-pulling, time-obsessive way to work.

When you work a typical office job, maybe you come in in the morning and fix some oatmeal. Maybe you check your personal email first. Maybe you do some work, make a couple of phone calls, get caught in an awkwardly polite and dreadfully protracted conversation about babies or dogs with a coworker by the coffee maker. Maybe you read a couple of blogs, do some more work, someone stops by your cube to complain about that meeting yesterday. Then lunch, more work, more blogs, check your personal email again. At some point you look up and notice it’s 5:30. So you pack up and head home, secure in the knowledge that you successfully worked a full day.

Now imagine that an evil troll sits above your desk at work, his gnarled hand hovering over the start/stop button on a stopwatch. He watches you all day long (creepy!). He lets the stopwatch run as long as you’re steadily plugging away at your work tasks. But every time you click some link a friend emails you, every time you gab with a coworker, every time you wander away from your desk for coffee or tea, every time you spend a few extra minutes trying to smooth down your cowlick in the bathroom mirror, every time you answer a personal phone call — the troll stops the clock, cackling insidiously all the while.

What a bastard, right?

Now, it’s 5:30 pm, yet somehow the clock shows you’ve only worked 5.78 hours so far that day. You, my friend, are accountable for another 2.23 hours before you can actually go home. Better get back to work, you lazy-ass punk!

This is basically my life, now. Except not inside an office. Also, I haven’t actually seen that troll around here, though I’m pretty sure if I did, I would punch him in the face.

If I could write the biggest thing I’ve learned over the past few weeks on a piece of paper, and underline it twenty-seven times, and draw fifty-three stars around it, and maybe put, like, purple glitter glue all around it in circles, it would be this: it’s really fucking hard to do eight solid hours of work per day.

Until I had this revelation, those first few weeks of the new job were like a smack in the face. I kept working until 8:00 p.m. every night and then wondering where I’d gone wrong. I slowly became obsessed with my daily schedule. If I could just get up an hour earlier, I’d think to myself while lying in bed, then I could start work an hour earlier, and then I could finish an hour earlier! Tomorrow I’d be better. Yes, tomorrow would be the day!

Then tomorrow would inevitably backslide into so much fail.

Each day is an epic battle with the clock. Never before have I been so keenly aware that my time literally equals money. Every time I pause during my workday, whether it be to fix lunch or wash some dishes or run a necessary errand or even just take a brain break, all I can think about is how I’m losing viable working time. Every time I stop the timer, I’m effectively pushing back the time I get to stop working. My boss invited me out to lunch recently and I actually almost declined because I knew I’d have to work that much later into the evening to make up for it. Appointments I used to love scheduling during the workday because it got me out of the office now give me the fits, because oh my god, TIME LOST TIME LOST PANIC PANIC DIE.

Look. I realize I’m painting a pretty negative picture of my new job. Let me be perfectly clear: I still love my job. I’ve already learned so much. And I love the process of it; I love the software I work with and the satisfaction of literally checking off my to-do list. It’s just been a really rough mental transition. I still wake up optimistic, but I still can’t quite seem to seize upon that ecstatic ambition, to wrap my hands around its neck and throttle it into submission.

Um, not that I really could before, when I had an office job. It’s just that lately true accomplishment has seemed even further out of reach.

But it’s getting better. I’m learning to forgive myself, learning to lower my expectations, learning to build in extra leeway during the day, and learning to accept that sometimes I’m just going to have to work until 8:00 p.m. And thankfully, my work hours during the week are closer to 30 than a full 40, so with hard and diligent work Monday through Thursday I can have most of Friday for my own personal projects. You know, like redesigning my website. Or penning a novel. Or replacing the fuel filter in my car or learning Polish or uncovering the secret of clear skin.

Just kidding.

Sort of.

What about you? Do you find yourself railing against the clock on a daily basis? How do you cope?

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¹ Unless Diddy is accustomed to feeling slothlike.

And then it all just came spilling out. I shared with him some of the horrible stuff that’s been floating around the intertubes this week, and we talked about it. It slowly dawned on me that we’d never really done this before. We talk about politics frequently, sure, but the conversation usually stops there. My blog reader is stocked with feeds on women’s issues, history, and pop culture analysis. The beau tends to be drawn to articles about science, research, and technology. Reading material is simply an area where our interests wildly diverge, and that’s okay — if we always did, read, and watched the same things we’d have nothing interesting to share with each other.

But that’s just the thing: I wasn’t sharing. I saw my online life as a completely separate thing from my offline life, and so I never really felt the need to fill my husband in on the details of which links I’d clicked in my browser that day. I wasn’t holding anything back on purpose — it’s just one of those patterns people fall into with each other. But then something kind of broke inside me this week. It was the news that did it, I think. That relentless wave of negativity about women, about race, about culture and politics and religion and, hell, even nature. It finally surged so greatly that it burst through my monitor screen, gushed over the keyboard, and knocked me flat on the ground. It was too big to keep inside anymore, so I found myself talking to the beau, word after word tumbling out so fast that I almost couldn’t keep up. I turned myself upside down and shook myself out, and all the words that had piled up inside me over this past week, this past month, this past year came tumbling out.

He listened. He read some of the articles that had undone me, and we shared our thoughts about them. We talked for a long time.

I didn’t know I could do this with him. We have known each other for nearly six years now, and we are still learning to see each other in new lights. This gave me great hope for the way our marriage might continue to unfold, even at a time when I wasn’t looking for or needing hope.

Have you ever had a similar thing happen?

Something about participating in International Women’s Day helped changed me this week. I’m not sure how or why, but I feel different. It’s like that metaphorical wave that came crashing through my monitor this week also washed away the crumbling barrier between my separate lives. At this point, after blogging, commenting, and tweeting for so long, I feel like I’ve put so much of my personal life out there online that I am online. I am the internet, in some bizarre future-dystopian fashion. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to continue pretending this part of my life doesn’t exist in front of certain people. I came thisclose to telling my mom I have a blog yesterday during our weekly phone call, but the old fear stopped me. If they knew about it, they would read it, and then I’d have to stop swearing so much and step away from squicky topics like sex. And I couldn’t ever really write about my relationship with them, not without honey-coating the saltier parts of it, or completely leaving stuff out altogether. How could I explain why I’ve kept it from them for so long without hurting their feelings? Moreover, just what the hell would they think?

What would they think indeed. I clicked over to my blog and scanned back a few pages with a critical eye. Oh, god, it was embarrassing. Cringe-worthy. My content has been shit for at least the past month. I blame the new job? Is it okay to blame the new job? I’m gonna just blame it, anyway. Even still, how did I let it get this bad?

This is my apology to you: I’m sorry.

And this is my promise to any of you who are still reading: I’m going to try harder. I’ve been trying harder, actually. Lately it’s taken every ounce of my strength to focus on my work during the weekdays, because all I want to do is write. So whenever I’ve had free time I’ve been putting posts together bit by bit, and some of those are nearly done. I’ve got some pieces coming that I actually feel proud of for once, so at least there’s that. Hopefully I can prove myself again.

Because even though I may neglect it sometimes, this space has become important to me. The people I’ve met through this space have become important to me. Anytime anyone leaves me a comment, it’s like Christmas up in this bitch. Unless it’s a mean comment. Then it’s despair up in this bitch. But so far the good far outweighs the bad.

I’m looking forward to making a few modifications around here over the next few weeks. I plan on moving this space from WordPress.com to self-hosting, so the ads that WordPress sneaks in here and there should stop. I’m also excited to rework the look and design of the blog for the first time.

Change is coming.

In the meantime, I’m simply buoyed by the fact that change is possible.

It’s not that we didn’t used to try. On our very first Valentine’s Day the beau took me out for a nice dinner with champagne. I was lacking in the funds department, and the only way I could reciprocate was with a handmade gift. So I made him a book of chaiku — chaiku being a combination of the word “haiku” and the beau’s real name, of course. This endeavor perhaps sounds lofty and romantic until you actually read a sample:

punctuation is
a smack on the ass — not all
are as well-spoken

I laid each page out in a pirated version of Photoshop on my home computer and printed them out at work on nice heavy paper, which I’m sure was an excellent use of company resources. I ripped the paper for that classic torn-edge look, then sewed the pages together with red and black thread right there at my desk — clearly, I was gunning for Employee of the Year.

I’d been hoping to make a fabulous design out of the thread, but instead ended up with a strange jumble. Oh well. He liked it anyway, so I must have done something right.

Next year it was the beau’s turn to be creative. I was working full-time and going back to school for design, and Valentine’s Day happened to fall on one of the nights I had a class. I remember walking back out to my car in the middle of an empty parking lot after 10:00 p.m., utterly exhausted, to find an unexpected flower and a handwritten letter waiting under my windshield wiper. I couldn’t stop smiling the rest of the night.

After that, I think our Valentine’s Day celebrations sort of tapered off for good. But my little trip down memory lane uncovered a whole host of cute things I gave to the beau back in the early days of our relationship. For instance, the very first thing I ever made for him was this get-well e-card:

We’d been dating a little over a month. He had the flu, and he liked the television show 24. At that point, there was little else I knew about the kid, so this is what he got.

When we’d been dating for nearly five months, I made a trifold brochure just to invite him out on a date:

Yeah, I know it looks hokey, but at this point I hadn’t gone back to school for design yet and I was laying this out in that same old pirated version of Photoshop. Don’t judge me so harsh, little girl.¹

The silly handmade treatment was definitely applied to gifts. For his 26th birthday, I drew him this clumsy illustration of a few of his favorite things,² yet again while I was supposed to be working:

For our first Christmas, I seized on an offhand comment he had made one day about the ridiculous warning illustration on the cap of a bottle of Andre Brut sparkling wine. I saved the cap, scanned it, and made it into a big logo, which I then printed out and ironed onto a t-shirt. It took me many frustrating tries, and in the end it didn’t even come out that great. He still wears the shirt, though, which is all you can ever hope for in a Christmas gift like that.

And for our second Christmas together, I made him two 10×10″ paintings. That was the first and last time I’ve painted in the eight years since I graduated college, so you know what that means: I was seriously broke around that time. Oh, and I also cared immensely about my boyfriend. That one, too.

Hmm. Looks like Jack Daniels has kinda been an ongoing theme with us.

Anyway. After about two years into our relationship, these kinds of thoughtful out-of-the-blue silliness and handmade gifts just stopped. There are two main reasons for this: 1) I wasn’t quite so broke anymore and could afford to actually buy things instead of make them, and 2) we moved in together and so it became difficult for either of us to make something for each other without ruining the surprise.

A third reason I’m reluctant to admit is that we just got plain lazy. I think there’s a turning point in each relationship after which you just don’t try as hard anymore. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in the sense that our relationship is utterly doomed. But if there’s anything this Valentine’s Day and our total lack of regard for it has taught me, it’s that we can do better for each other than we have been. And not just one day out of the year, either.

I have no interest in participating in the Romance Industrial Complex’s annual production of Now THAT’S What I Call LOVE! How to Make it and What to Buy For It, Pt. XXXIV. But I don’t think the core sentiment behind Valentine’s Day is totally baseless, either. The key is in sticking to what feels romantic to you. For me, my best attempts at romance always involve creating something ridiculous and demented. So on this much-maligned day, I’m making a pledge to return to those roots. To go back to making absurd cards and drawings that show my affection for my beloved, just like I used to.

But uh, not today. It’s getting kind of late, you know, and um, I’m already kind of tired. Tomorrow, maybe? We’ll see.

What about you guys? Do you bother to recognize Valentine’s Day? Have you ever made silly things for your person? Confess or die!

_______________________________________________________

¹ SO YOU GOT A PLAYBOY MOMMYYYYYYYYYYYYY

² It’s, um, the beau ascending a massive bottle of Jack Daniels on a beautiful beach while a dinosaur and an outsize fighter jet do battle in the background. I threw in the coconut-breasted Swedish twins as a joke.

What was up with that?

Some people ooze natural confidence like a leaky barrel of industrial waste. I am not one of those people. No matter how hard I fight it, a core part of me will probably always believe that I am the weirdest-looking, awkwardest person in any given room. If you handed me a set of crayons and asked me to draw a self-portrait, I would hand you back a finished product that would resemble, at best, a cross between a severely misshapen Mr. Bill and an illustration by Allie Brosh. My skin would be the color and consistency of old paste, my hair would be a dirt-brown stringy halo of flyaways, my face would be an indeterminate mashed-potato-like lump, my eyes would be crooked and set too far apart, my nose would resemble a bulbous Christmas ornament, my midsection would feature several dozen rolls of flab, my thighs would look like grainy stills from the 1969 moon landing, and each of my feet would be 10 inches wide and — mysteriously — webbed.

Self-portrait in mirror at 25. If you cannot tell from my set jaw, glum expression, and artfully messy hair, things were very serious at 25. I spent a lot of time inside the room I was renting in this house, listening to Arcade Fire's "Funeral" album and reviewing my life regrets on continuous loop.

Sounds horrific and embarrassing, right? Well, there I was, sitting in front of my friend — my pretty, petite, lovely friend — desperately trying not to let my simmering internal stew spew out across the couch and all over her. Because I mean, seriously, have you ever gotten horrific embarrassment on your clothes? That stuff never washes out.

Plainly, my reservoir of self-worth was already low and continuing to drop every moment. I unconsciously felt like I couldn’t measure up to the charming specter in front of me, and it was showing — in my body, in the way that I held myself. And that just wasn’t right.

You know, I’ve been talking a lot both on this blog and in person about the process of getting older. It’s a well-worn cliché, but something about hitting 30 just makes you reflect. And I’ve been pushing back hard against the notion that youth is the ultimate achievement. I’ve been actively seeking the positive in the aging process, because honestly, what else do I have left to hold onto?

One giant, flashing neon plus sign is that I’m a lot sharper than I used to be, and — lingering negative mental pictures of myself aside — I’m generally a hell of a lot more confident than I used to be. You could drone on about how 30 is the new 20, grey is the new black, smart is the new sexy, almond milk is the new soy, quarrelsome is the new belligerent; whatever — but I’ve made genuinely solid advances towards appreciating myself for who I am, flaws included. And that’s not something that could have happened without having the experiences of my 20s tucked in my back pocket. And even that is beginning to sound like a well-worn cliché, but there’s nothing trite about learning to like yourself even at your messiest and most doubtful. After the rocky road I’ve walked in the past decade? That’s cause for a motherfucking celebration, is what it is.

And here’s how I celebrated, in that clumsy moment of clarity on the couch: I sat up straight, squared my shoulders, unwound my limbs and opened my heart wide.

Confidence — at 30, it’s the new low self-esteem.

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¹ Kind of akin to that King Missile song “Detachable Penis.” Yeah? Yeah? Hmm. Right.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I do need a New Year’s resolution: write better lists.